Writing Prompt Response
I Don’t Want Your Freedom
With thanks to George Michael and T.S. Eliot
As a kid, I groaned at those commercials in the middle of cartoons that would end by flashing to a screen that said, “The More You Know.” I still cringe thinking about them and having outgrown my know-it-all kid confidence, I can say from my 40s that you only know some things through age and experience.
I did well in school, but once I learned how to read (something that has brought me hours and hours of pleasure), teachers couldn’t teach me the kinds of things that make up a person’s overall happiness in life.
In college, I minored in philosophy and learned about free will and existential freedom, but it’s one thing to have beliefs and bookshelves full of books. It’s another to know how to date, have functional relationships, and recognize you have the freedom to walk away from a painful situation instead of waiting for someone to change.
It’s yet another thing to know that only you have the freedom to improve your own life by learning to love yourself and take care of your true needs (once you figure out what they are, which is harder than it might seem).
“What does freedom mean to you?” Ellie Jacobson asks in a prompt for Flint & Steel. The question made me think of two quotes, one that I learned in college and one that I learned years later in a gay karaoke bar.
In a college English class, I read “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot, and when he writes there about freedom, he says, “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”
Why not use the key instead of only thinking about it and keeping ourselves locked away? I read the lines as meaning we’re all locked inside ourselves and our own perceptions of the world, unable to break out and connect with others. But Eliot never says we can’t access the key, only that we get caught up thinking about it.
Twenty years later, I dated a woman who loved karaoke, and we used to go to a gay bar that had karaoke every night. My favorite song to sing was “Faith” by George Michael, and as I was looking up other songs to expand my repertoire, I found “Freedom” by Wham!.
George Michael wrote the lyrics to this song, and there’s an echo of Eliot when he says, “Like a prisoner who has his own key / But I can’t escape until you love me.”
There’s trouble when our freedom depends on other people. I don’t mean to minimize the fact that there are larger societal forces that have limited (and do limit) the freedom of many, many people. On the individual level, when it comes to emotional freedom and the ability to live and act and grow in the ways we want, how often are we choosing not to use the key because of what other people want us to do, or because we want to please and/or be with someone else?
The chorus of the song starts with, “I don’t want your freedom.” Reading the lyrics today, I put the emphasis on your. Who wants someone else’s idea of freedom? Nobody can tell you how to feel or act freely. One person’s ideal can be another person’s pain.
Today I see freedom as the choice and power to act in ways that help me and don’t hurt me. It’s the feeling that I’m choosing, as much as possible, how I want my life to be. It’s taken me too many years to understand the ways I’ve compromised too much with other people and not bothered to know and value what I truly need or want in my life.
Likewise, I wasn’t skilled at asking the questions of each of my past girlfriends that would have helped me understand what she needed, too. Now I know that if we’re lucky, we might find a deeply mutual relationship where we develop a sincere and supportive interest in each other’s personal growth. When we find that kind of connection, it takes time and patience to work.
George Michael wrote “Freedom” when he was really young. When you’re young and excited about love, the last things you want to think about are time and patience. But freedom happens slowly and individually, without giving someone else the key that belongs in the pocket of your own perfectly faded blue jeans.